View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Humanities Commons Vigiliae Christianae Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011) 311-328 brill.nl/vc Preserving the Divine: αὐτο- Prefixed Generative Terms and the Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex Ellen Muehlberger University of Michigan, 4163 Thayer Academic Building, 202 South Thayer Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 USA [email protected] Abstract In Greek literature from antiquity, there is a set of terms formed from verbs of origina- tion or generation and prefixed with αὐτο-, which are represented primarily in three types of literature prior to the fifth century: in the surviving fragments from Nume- nius, in apologetic histories which incorporate oracular statements about first gods, and in the reports about and examples of Sethian literature. By considering the range of transliterated words in the Coptic Untitled Treatise based upon αὐτο- prefixed generative terms from Greek, we can discern several of the traditions that underlie this text’s multiple, often competing, narratives about the structure and population of the divine world. Many of those traditions are also recorded in apologetic his - tories, and comparison with these shows that the Untitled Treatise is an example of a different mode of historical writing, one which is preservationist rather than explicitly persuasive. Keywords Untitled Treatise, historiography, apologetics, Sethian, Numenius Introduction The Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex is an enigmatic text—it is, quite literally, a puzzle on several levels. The condition of its physical survival is one issue: what scholars now call the Bruce Codex was purchased in 1796 as a set of seventy-eight unbound folios, many of which were marked by drawings, diagrams, and specially drawn letters. However, a large portion of the folios had no indices or divisions. At one point, the folios were bound by the Bodleian Library, with no care for orientation or a © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007211X543040 312 E. Muehlberger / Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011) 311-328 reconstructed order.1 As a result, the origin of the Codex—and many of the details of its existence as a codex—remain mysterious to us. This has not kept scholars from trying to make sense of the contents: though the folios were badly damaged, Carl Schmidt’s early efforts reconstructed a possible set of texts from the Codex. Even though the Untitled Treatise was identified as a unified piece of writing separate from the two Books of Jeu, its later editors have acknowledged that it is, itself, likely a compilation from a number of other works.2 Thus, understanding the content of the Untitled Treatise is another issue: its mythological narratives and the sources from which they might be drawn are confused, for there are multiple cos- mological schemata contained in the Treatise which do not necessarily cohere and which the redactor did not exert himself to weave together. Neither the Bruce Codex, nor the texts contained in it, have a clear or eas- ily traceable provenance. With these complexities, the Untitled Treatise can confound even the most dedicated of readers. In this essay, I propose a philologically and his- torically specific tool for parsing the Untitled Treatise, one that can offer a solution to some questions about the Treatise. In Greek literature from antiquity, there is a set of terms, formed from verbs of origination or gen- eration and prefixed with αὐτο-, that appear infrequently but which, when they do appear, have quite specific contexts and meanings that are easily traced. They are represented primarily in three types of literature prior to the fifth century: philosophical discussions of the first and second god, as in the surviving fragments from Numenius; apologetic histories incorpo- rating oracular statements about first gods; and the reports about and examples of Sethian literature. By considering the range of transliterated words in the text based upon αὐτο- prefixed generative terms from Greek, we can discern several of the traditions preserved by the Untitled Treatise, which records multiple, often competing, narratives about the structure and population of the divine world. Scholars have taken this bewildering proliferation of divine characters in the Treatise as a sign that it should no longer be considered a part of the Sethian group, the primary examples of 1) Introduction to The Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, ed. Carl Schmidt, trans. Violet MacDermot, NHS 13 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), xi. This edition is based on Carl Schmidt’s edition of the late nineteenth century (Gnostische Schriften in koptischer Sprache aus dem Codex Brucianus, TU 8 [Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1892]). I am deeply grate- ful for the suggestions and encouragement I have received from David Brakke, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, Gina Brandolino, and the anonymous reader for Vigiliae Christianae. 2) MacDermot, Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, xiii. Preserving the Divine 313 which have a more limited, yet still impressive, number of divine actors. Fair enough, but even more than ruling out a context for the Treatise among Sethian works, attention to the proliferation of divine beings in the text, and specifically to the ways that αὐτο- prefixed generative terms are used about these beings, can yield useful information about the Untitled Treatise’s historical context. For such proliferation is also a signal of the compiler’s impulse to gather information about the divine, without a concerted effort to harmonize or reconcile the variant traditions he recorded. TheUntitled Treatise has been recently dated to the fourth century, and its particular style of historiogra- phy, which I will call “preservationist,” is quite different from the style most often employed in late antiquity to report outside accounts of the divine: the persuasive mode exemplified in the apologetic histories written by Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries.3 Compared to texts like Lactantius’s Divine Institutes and Eusebius’s Preparatio Evangelica, the Treatise represents a unique method, an unapologetic historiographical style, rather unlike that of Lactantius and Eusebius. What is more, given the coincidence of specific terms such as αὐτοπατήρ, αὐτοφυής, and αὐτογέννητος (and their derivatives) in the Untitled Treatise and in works of apologetic history, it is possible that the Untitled Treatise is a response to the evaluative and hierarchical arguments of apologetic historians. To prove these claims, I will explore three areas. First, I discuss the major trends in the use of αὐτο- prefixed generative terms in Greek literature up through the fourth century; second, I show how these trends are repre- sented as potential sources used in the Untitled Treatise, and third, I explain how the inclusion of these trends in the Untitled Treatise is the result of a preservationist historiography. Generation of the Divine: The Uses of αὐτο- Prefixed Generative Terms In Irenaeus’s second-century work Against Heresies, he records at length the myth of a group that posits the existence of a divine character, the “Self- Originate.”4 This myth is now recognized as something quite similar to the myth recounted in the Apocryphon of John, taken by scholars as the paragon 3) See, for example, the discussion of such works in Pier Franco Beatrice’s article, “Pagan Wisdom and Christian Theology according to the Tübingen Theosophy,”Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 (1995): 403-418. 4) Against Heresies 1.29. 314 E. Muehlberger / Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011) 311-328 of the Sethian text group. What follows is the Apocryphon’s narration of the origin of the ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ, a product of the highest god (here called alter- nately the “pure light,” or “Father”) and the Barbelo, a second divine being: And Barbelo[n] gazed intently into the pure light. And turned to him and gave birth to a spark of light resembling the blessed light, but he is not equal in greatness. This is the only-begotten One, who came forth from the Father, the divine self-originate [ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ], the first-born Son of all the Father’s [sons], the pure light. 5 In this text, the ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ is an entity produced by the Father and the Barbelo; it is made to resemble the pure light, but is less than that light. Thus it is something secondary and incomplete, later being “completed” by the Father.6 As should be evident from this cosmological narrative, ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ is a title, rather than a description. Though its production is quite special and different from the generation of the multitude of other beings in the Apocryphon of John, the “Self-Originate” is not, in any mean- ingful way, something self-originate. The titular, rather than descriptive, character of this name persists throughout the Sethian corpus. Though other texts in the corpus recount slightly different activities for and representations of the ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ, in none of these is the term ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ an indicator of the nature of the character. In the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, for example, ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ is an adjective that applies to a particular god and to a realm into which many beings are baptized. In Zostrianos, one of the Platonizing treatises identified by John Turner, the ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ also remains a title, one of the three revealed powers of the triple-powered aeon: the Hidden, the First Manifest, and the Self-Originate.7 There is a Self-Originate, and 5) Michael Waldstein and Frederick Wisse, eds., The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 40-42 (9.5- 10.9 of NHC III). There is a variation in BG, havingⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲧⲟⲥ in place of ⲁⲩⲧⲟⲅⲉⲛⲏⲥ. Though theApocryphon of John survives only in Coptic translation, I include it, and other Sethian works, in this survey of Greek uses of αὐτο- prefixed generative terms.